Fri 26 Dec 2014
ROBERT GILLESPIE – The Crossword Mystery. Raven House, paperback original, 1980.
As I understand it, the first four Raven House titles (this is #3) were sent out as advance samples to at least some, if not all, of the subscribers to Harlequin’s line of romance titles. I don’t know if the story is true, but if it is, I wonder what those women thought of this book. As the title indicates, it’s purely a puzzle story, but the language used is often surprisingly crude and foul — of the four letter variety.
There’s also one pretty good sex scene, and one fairly brutal, which is not so good. This does not count the murder of Mary Cross, Rocky Caputo’s predecessor as the crossword editor of the New York Herald-Courier. Means of death: starvation in a locked room, complicated by cirrhosis of the liver.
The puzzle itself — a message in cryptograms, only later as a crossword — is major league, but as we all know, cleverness alone does not a novel make. Gillespie shows promise, but he needs more seasoning. Overall, I’d say Triple A ball in the minors, at best, and if you can’t stand crossword puzzles at all, you can probably skip this one.
Rating: C
[UPDATE] 12-26-14. This appears to have been Rocky Caputo’s only recorded brush with murder. It was the author’s first book. Hubin records seven additional titles to his credit, five of them with a series character named Ralph Simmons, a retired advertising director of the same newspaper that Caputo worked for.
It would have been clear — or at least clearer — to readers of this review back in 1981 that Raven House was an attempt by Harlequin Books to create a line of paperback mysteries. The imprint didn’t last long, and sometime I’d like to take a longer look into what kinds of mysteries they published and some of the highlights of the series. There is not room in this small footnote to do so now, however. For now, it may suffice to give you this link to this New York Times article that appeared soon after Raven House began.
December 26th, 2014 at 10:55 pm
The best thing about Raven and its sister line in SF was that a few old pros did their last book there — or one of their last — James Fox and William Campbell Gault to name two. I don’t recall either line producing anything exceptional during their short lifespan, but they produced a few decent ones despite those awful covers.
I confess I never even saw this on the stands.
December 26th, 2014 at 11:12 pm
I’d forgotten about Laser Books, Harlequin’s SF line. It lasted a while but only a few turned out to have much value. They were badly edited, as I recall, and far from the most of the authors’ best work. The last 3 or 4 are collectible, or they were at one time, because they were sent out only to subscribers and never showed up in retail markets. I think the Raven House books were sold mostly to subscribers too, but I think I remember buying this one from a store the next town over that sold mostly comic books.
December 27th, 2014 at 12:08 am
I was always a sucker for uniform sets or series. I hadn’t looked at my Raven House set for years and I just took a look downstairs where I found 40 of them numbered 1-40 on the spines and an additional 5 without numbers, one marked “introductory copy” on the front cover. I bought them as fast as they came out, but read none of them. My copy of the Gillespie is number 19.
December 27th, 2014 at 1:38 am
Randy
Combined with Michael Cook’s comments on the Raven House series in his book MURDER BY MAIL, this seems to confirm what I have always suspected. That there were two sets of Raven House books.
The first one was mail order only, and Cook lists 72 in that series, with this book by Gillespie numbered #3. Then, Cook says, once the 72 subscription books had been published, they did second and third printings that went out to the usual bookstore outlets, but with different numbering.
I think that somewhere I have a complete set of the original 72, but your set of 1-40 came later on and were actually sold in stores.
Or at least that’s how I have it puzzled out in my mind so far. If you’d like to pursue this, I think I can scan the list of 1-72 in Cook’s book and post it here.
December 27th, 2014 at 8:42 am
Don’t forget the two books by our fellow DAPA-EMmer Richard Moore, DEATH IN THE PAST (#7) and DEATH OF A SOURCE (#38). Both are well worth your time.
December 27th, 2014 at 1:38 pm
Steve,
I think I will pass on the opportunity to pursue the study of Raven House. I don’t have the time and energy I once had. At least I’ve learned that mine is not a complete set. I never knew they were sold by mail. I looked at my copy of MURDER BY MAIL and realize there must have been more than one edition of that as mine from 1979 does not mention Raven House at all.
Incidentally, Michael Cook must have been a dynamo. He turned out indexes and lists by the dozens — he worked so fast he sometimes made errors. When I was editing Dime Novel Round-Up I used his index to the first 50 years on a daily basis. That way I noticed that he had confused Upton SINCLAIR with SINCLAIR Lewis in one place. An article about a boys’ book by Sinclair Lewis was indexed under Upton Sinclair.
December 27th, 2014 at 1:59 pm
I’ve just checked my copy or MURDER BY MAIL, and you’re right. Mine has a 1983 copyright date and says it’s a revised and expanded version of the First Edition published in 1979.
December 27th, 2014 at 4:17 pm
The few Raven and Laser books I had were purchased at newsstands, though the insert for the subscription was in every book. Over all the Laser titles were at the low end of mediocre, though it was nice to see Raymond F. Jones one last time. Raven was more up and down though with no real standouts I can remember.
I bought more of the Laser titles because they all had attractive covers by Kelly Freas.
Odd that the review mentions the crude language and sex because I recall checking out the author’s guidelines for the series and they were restrictive about that. They were aiming at a different audience than Gold Medal or most paperback originals — likely genre companions to their romance line.
That restrictive nature and the low advances kept a lot of writers away who might otherwise have gone with them. I had the feeling that the books they published by pro writers were older manuscripts that hadn’t been published for one reason or another and were dressed up and sold to Raven and Laser for what money could be made on them.
Both series were a bad misreading of the market at that moment, and doomed to failure almost from the start. There was no cohesion to the series, you didn’t know what you were going to get unlike Hard Case Crime or the Hubbard subscription publishing today.
December 27th, 2014 at 6:08 pm
Steve,
Glad to get the different editions of MURDER BY MAIL sorted out.
David,
I don’t think I ever noticed the Laser books. At least I don’t remember them.
December 27th, 2014 at 10:39 pm
Steve,
Do you know anything about a couple of other paperback sets/series the Ace Classic Crime Collection and the Dell Great Mysteries? I have a lot of the first. (Some of them had sequence numbers on the spines, others didn’t.) Nice attractive design covers on the Ace books. I don’t think either was offered through the mail.
December 27th, 2014 at 10:48 pm
Randy
I’m sure it was Avon, not Ace, that did the Classic Crime set. I’ve never made a list of either that series or the Dell Great Mysteries, but in their heyday, they were quite collectible. I don’t think today’s crop of paperback collectors, if there are any under 50 years old, cares a whit.
I think that Jeff Meyerson may have published a list of books in both series. I’ll ask him tomorrow.
And no, these were never offered by mail, no more than most every paperback company back then had ads in the back of their books selling them by mail.
December 27th, 2014 at 11:12 pm
The Dell series was a distinguished one of top writers from Malcolm Muggeridge’s one outing to Macdonald’s WARRANT FOR X and Berkeley’s TRIAL AND ERROR. I want to say Anthony Boucher, Humphrey Bogart, and Bennett Cerf were among those who picked the titles early on but I may be confusing publishers. I have a memory of John Dickson Carr being part of that editorial panel too, but again I’m not sure.
This was around the time Collier was also publishing numerous classics in the field including Van Dine, Rawson, and others.
At the time Dell was also the publisher for Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen.
My memory of the Dell series were that they were attractive paperbacks throughout their lifetime which I think was late fifties to mid or late sixties.
I don’t recall the Ace Crime series though I wonder if it was meant to be a companion to the Ace SF Specials. I know Ace at various time published Simenon, Philip Loraine, Robert L. Fish and others but save for the Doubles I never really think of them as a mystery publisher.
December 28th, 2014 at 12:56 am
You’re right about Avon publishing a lot more mystery fiction than Ace did, other than the latter’s well-known Doubles, but Avon’s line of Classic Crime mysteries came along in the 1970s, with a distinctive uniform cover design. Sayers might have been one of the authors, but off the top of my head I remember Raoul Whitfield, Michael Innes, Philip MacDonald and even Emma Lathen, an early one. I have no idea how many there were.
December 27th, 2014 at 11:18 pm
It was more likely Avon. They were responsible for the first wide spread paperback printing of Dorothy Sayers and also published the Drury Lane novels that Dannay and Lee wrote as Barnaby Ross, and of course early on had published everyone from the Saint to Peter Cheyney.
I can’t recall Ace being very deep in the genre at any point.
December 27th, 2014 at 11:26 pm
Re the subscription series in paperback I think Harlequin may have been the first paperback line to try that though it later spread to the men’s action and some of the adult western series.
To the best of my memory Harlequin started this with their romance line before anyone else because their readers often lived in places where there weren’t many venues for books and because many were older women who mostly bought their copies from second hand stores.
I can’t think of anyone before them though there have been numerous since unless you want to consider things like The Traveler’s Companion and Olympia Press which were well out of the mainstream.
December 28th, 2014 at 8:48 am
Yes Steve, Avon Classic Crime Collection. I’ll have to check Bill Deeck’s Index to The Poisoned Pen to see if it was in there.
December 28th, 2014 at 2:52 pm
Yes, yes, it was Avon and not Ace. I have at least 37 of them. As for the Dell Great Mystery Library, the judges pictured on the back of some titles are Anthony Boucher, Humphrey Bogart and Louis Untermeyer. Bogart (who died in 1957) was replaced by Boris Karloff. After Book 15 (The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake) there were no photos on the back covers, but the editors of Boucher, Karloff and Untermeyer are found listed inside. I have seen a list of titles up to #25 (The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne).
December 28th, 2014 at 3:18 pm
No. 29 (The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr) is the last one I have in the Dell Great Mystery Library with a number on it. It’s a first printing of 1960. After that there were a number of un-numbered titles in the series and the books were a bit taller than the earlier standard size. Not quite as attractive.
December 28th, 2014 at 6:53 pm
Jeff says he remembers lists of both the Avon Classic Crime books and the Dell Great Mysteries, but he hasn’t located them yet. He also reminded me of a third imprint of paperback mysteries, the Green Door series from Pyramid. All three imprints were collectible at the time, but not as much as the Dell mapbacks from the 1949 and early 50s, but they too have only a third of their one-time value. If that much.
The world has moved on.
December 28th, 2014 at 7:12 pm
Green Door included the Lockridge’s Mr. and Mrs. North and Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s Asey Mayo at least and I think Manning Coles Tommy Hambledon.
I don’t recall Berkeley having a special mystery line, but they certainly had a long history with the genre.
December 28th, 2014 at 11:57 pm
Sayers wasn’t part of Avon’s classics series, but Avon was the first paperback publisher to do a uniform printing of the Wimsey mysteries. Prior to that I think only two or at most three had been available in American paperbacks.
I’m almost certain STRONG POISON and maybe CLOUDS OF WITNESS had been in American paperback release early on (I want to say Pocket Books but I’m not sure), but I don’t think until Avon anyone had reprinted Sayers since the 40’s.
For that matter I don’t recall much Allingham available until McFadden-Bartel started reprinting Campion titles in really ugly paperbacks. My copy of TIGER IN THE SMOKE was first a READER’S DIGEST condensed version then the Brit hardcover. Marsh of course had been at PB, Bantam, Berkley, and Dell.
As big as Sayers is today there seems to be nearly two decades when she was virtually unknown in this country to general readers.
Speaking of mystery lines didn’t Popular Library reprint the Crime Club line?
And I think Arthur Crook was one of the series Pyramid reprinted as a Green Door book. For some reason they also reprinted most of those hard boiled short collections like MY NAME IS CHAMBERS, MY NAME IS JORDAN, etc even though they didn’t always reprint other books by those writers, that being a small series in itself.
December 29th, 2014 at 2:42 pm
Harper reprinted Sayers in hardcover in the 1950s and 1960s in a handsome edition. I assumed I was going to read the books more than once so I bought them as I saw them in bookstores or ordered them through the bookstore in the college where I worked at the time. I have always looked younger than my age and I still remember when I was standing in line with a stack of the Sayers titles and a student in front of me in the line turned and said it looked like I had signed up for a course that had a reading list composed of novels. I don’t recall what I said in reply.